This invention pertains to means for supporting markers, memorials, gravestones and/or monuments in cemeteries and the like, particularly where vaults or liners for encasement of a casket are not used.
The erection of monuments on a grave, after it has been back filled, encounters a variety of problems. If the monument is supported on the fill dirt too soon after the grave has been back filled, the fill dirt is likely to settle several times, changing the contour of the ground and thereby causing the monument to shift or sink, or even topple. Delay in installing monuments to permit the fill dirt to settle usually is not a satisfactory solution, particularly where a vault or liner is not used to encase the casket. Moreover, caskets are made of wood or metal and gradually deteriorate in the ground, thereby causing the dirt above the casket to settle several times again. Such displacement of the soil above a casket can occur at any time. Hence, there is no assurance that merely delaying the erection of a monument to permit the fill dirt to settle will eliminate the problem of the sinking, shifting or toppling of a monument. In addition, installation of monuments in the winter months generally has not been practical. Poured concrete usually is employed in preparing monument foundations, and should not be poured below about 45.degree. F.
To obviate these problems, various attempts have been made to provide supports or foundations for cemetery monuments. Such supports are designed to rest on the bottom of the grave, and to extend upwardly and around the interred casket. They usually include a footer having a pair of spaced vertical legs which straddle the casket. A common type of footer for a cemetery monument foundation is the pier type consisting of two separate vertical legs and a separate horizontal cross member or slab extending over the casket and supported by the legs. The legs usually comprise two separate vertical slabs standing on end, or several bricks or cement blocks piled vertically, end on end. Pier type footers normally are used to support poured concrete, which fills the gap between the top of the cross member and the ground surface adjacent the grave. In such installations, the monument rests on the poured concrete supported by the footer. Such monument foundations are highly unstable, because of their tendency to wobble, and therefore are lacking in safety. Examples of more rigid cemetery monument supports are illustrated by Swiss Pat. No. 217,791 (1942), German Pat. No. 812,906 (1951) and U.S. Pat. No. 4,019,294 (1977). The support arrangements of those patents extend upwardly from the bottom of the grave, and terminate in a monument support base generally level with the ground surface. While use of such supports avoids the dirt settling problems inherent in a grave, they do not provide a satisfactory solution. The major drawback of such supports is their lack of stability, which renders them unsafe. Also difficulty may be encountered in lowering a casket into a grave to be positioned properly relative to the two vertical legs of such foundation.
Because supports or foundations of the type illustrated in those patents are relatively unstable, they are subject to substantial displacement, or even collapse, if they are jarred by natural causes, or by digging equipment being used in an adjacent grave. If such equipment should strike the support, it could be dislodged, causing the monument which it supports to fall and possibly injure personnel in the area. At the very least, if such accident should occur, and the support be dislodged, the monument would be displaced or tilted, thereby necessitating adjustment and/or repair.
The marker support of U.S. Pat. No. 4,019,294 endeavors to overcome the problems inherent in the earlier arrangements illustrated in the Swiss and German patents aforesaid. But the footer of that United States patent is lacking in sufficient stability, and hence is readily susceptible to serious displacement, due to the fact that its vertical side members are not integral, but are separated at their mid-points, their weakest and most vulnerable support areas. The breaks in the side members of that footer occur at the attentuated ends of the four vertical legs forming the side members. The heavier the monument to be supported, the greater the risk that such footer is likely to crack or break in the areas of the joints formed at the mid-points of the vertical side members, rendering the entire structure consisting of the foundation and its monument vulnerable to collapse. The footer of that patent suffers, also, from another deficiency which arises during the lowering of a casket into the grave. Because the lower component of that footer is U-shaped, with two upstanding legs, the casket, when it is lowered, may strike one or the other of those legs and be tilted about its longitudinal axis. Such mishap not only may require raising and re-lowering of the casket into the grave, but is rife with the possibility that the casket could be tilted sufficiently for its lid to open, if unsecured, with the result that the cadaver therein might fall out.